Tag: farming

ƒMaupassant likes his stories spiked with brutality. The domestic violence of “Le Noyé” gets gratuitous. So it does in “Histoire d’une fille de ferme,” which culminates with the farmer brutalizing Rose, the farmhand, because she won’t get pregnant. (“All boys are thus,” London writes in the Priestly Prerogative.”) That’s after he invites himself to her bed and essentially rapes her to take possession of her. Six years before Rose had a fling with another farmhand and got pregnant. She went away to be with her dying mother at the convenient time when she gave birth far from her village, so she could leave her son with others to raise and return to the farm, where she becomes very skilled at making money for her farmer in hopes of getting a raise. She doesn’t get a raise, but a marriage proposal from the farmer, which she rebuffs, because of her unspoken son, until he takes her. It goes well at first, then sours. He beats her up. She finally tells him why she’s not having another child, since she has one already (it’s a flaw in the story: what would keep her from getting pregnant again, since she’s obviously fertile?) The farmer becomes all soft and happy to adopt her son. And so it’s a happy ending.

But there are also awfully prejudiced lines that accent Maupassant’s limitations: “Elle ne consentait pas, pour sûr, mais elle résistaitnonchalamment, luttant elle-même contre l’instinct toujours plus puissant chez les natures simples, et mal protégée par la volonté indécise de ces races inertes et molles.” The story’s shallow presumptions about Rose frame its soft-porn paternalism, the paternalism only amplified by the happy ending, which does not resolve the hell Rose had to go through, hiding, pretending, denying, and submitting to such denigration and violence before the farmer’s epiphany–not for Rose’s sake, but because he finally could have a son he could adopt and call his own. Rose remains a vessel, abused and stepped on, to the end.

A story of coldness without and within. Jason and Sara Morton, a couple, only 50 years old, farmers, are in bed at night freezing, silent, all words and warmth having fled from their marriage, on a night when the whistle blows to alert farmers of a freeze. They get up, cover the tomatoes with their own clothes, return to the house, then start burning their last logs, a chair, the kitchen table that had sat there thirty years. It’s all gone, the night isn;t over and the whistle is still blowing. A terribly existential story from the first line: “The darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that had been worn and worn for many winters and always lets the cold through to the bones.” The coldness, the whiteness of the moon’s light, drenching everything indifferently without hint of warmth, amplifies the existential condition of the couple and their isolated farm, as alone as could be.